Search Results

I think that the real problem is that many GPs don't know much about diabetes. They are telling you what is in the medical textbooks, which is quite limited and hideously out of date. I have one of the main endocrinology books that is used in teaching today, and it's dietary advice is...

Do you know of first hand accounts of this - I don't think there are very many? Other than the papers that I mentioned, my main source on this is the only one of Stefansson's books that I have read: Stefansson, V. (1960) Cancer: Disease of civilization? An anthropological and historical study...

You probably are being a bit impatient, these things don't happen overnight. You are right, in that you eventually want to get your BG a lot lower than 7, but it is a lot to expect it to be much lower than that only two weeks after diagnosis. If you stick to a seriously low carb diet, then it...

I'm not an anthropological historian - you may well be right. Mind you, the term Inuit covers a wide range of different people, living over a colossal area of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia. There are major linguistic, cultural and quite possibly dietary differences between these...

No, but very close. They ate very small quantities of blueberry and kelp, to make food more interesting - rather as we might use spices. Bear in mind that this diet - along with many aspects of the Inuit culture - has completely disappeared now, this is what the modern Inuit's great...

This is why the company that made them went bust. They were unreliable, caused skin problems and expensive. What was left of the company, including several patents, was sold to one of the glucose monitor manufacturers, but the GlucoWatch is dead. I have no doubt that this sort of technology...

I don't fancy it myself - but Stefansson (who was one of the volunteers) got to like it. He spent most of the rest of his life living on an ultra low carbohydrate diet consisting of mostly meat and fish (he lived to be 83 - quite healthily). He wrote a book on diet called "Not by Bread Alone"...

You can't use metformin to "chase" the BG spike caused by a particular meal. It's action is much too slow (it takes days or weeks to build up in your system). The reason why you take it with a meal is to stop it doing horrible things to your gut, not to counteract that meal. As others have...

Congratulations :) As I have said many times before, whatever works for you is good. It also sounds like you have a good medical team, and you are lucky with that (if you read much on this forum you will see that the quality of healthcare people get on the NHS is wildly variable - the...

It is possible to live on a diet that has only trace carbohydrates and remain apparently healthy for long periods of time. In the early days of nutritional research, before many preconceptions about diet were set in stone, there was some interest in this sort of thing. This was inspired by a...

It sounds like you have a pretty good healthcare team. I only wish everyone was as fortunate. As your optician told you, your eyes are likely to change quickly as your body gets used to running at a much lower BG level - so it isn't worth spending a lot of money on glasses right now. However...

OK, my experience with AA is limited. A friend of mine - who used to have a big drinking problem, swears by them, and reckons that they saved his life. He quit completely, and about five years on he hasn't lapsed. I don't know about their dubious advice, but he isn't religious and although...

I am afraid that I think an HbA1c of 6.3% is a bit high. This suggests that your average BG is very roughly 7.5 mmol/l, and as a rough rule of thumb 7 mmol/l is the cut-off point for damage. In order to completely minimize (or even eliminate) the risk of complications you want to get your...

This sort of thing makes me very cross. Your "healthcare professionals" are giving you bad and potentially dangerous advice and doing so with an arrogant "we know best" attitude. Sadly, that is all too common - but I have never heard of quite so much rubbish being spouted as by your nurse...

Too bloody right - this is far too common an attitude, and it makes me very cross. Not only is it infuriating it is downright dangerous. It sounds as though this "Diabetic Nurse" has been spouting the standard line out of a badly out of date training manual. I will post again later, when I...

No cure, as yet, but there is a lot of hope. There are any number of really promising new treatments that are being investigated by various teams of researchers all around the world. These include stem cell therapy, gene therapy, beta cell transplants, artificial pancreases, new drugs, new...

Anyone can get any sort of diabetes at any age. I did a quick literature search, and I found one paper describing a newly diagnosed T1 who was 94 (this paper claimed that the previous oldest known case was 93). At diagnosis a T1 is typically under 30 (often a lot under 30) and thin, whereas a...

BTW - the ketone test that several people have talked about doesn't in itself tell you what sort of diabetes you have. Rather, it will give you advance warning of the dreaded DKA (Diabetic Ketoacidosis). This is a dangerous (in fact potentially fatal) complication of diabetes - that is usually...

It really does sound like you have been given very poor (and possibly dangerous) advice. Your symptoms do sound like T1, but don't take my (or anyone else's) word for it. The only way that you can tell the difference between T1 and T2 in the early stages is with a test that measures your...

Quite the opposite. One common symptoms of a salt deficiency is leg cramps, and if you sweat a lot during exercise then you will loose more salt - potentially making things worse. The body needs some salt to function - it is just that there is so salt much in so many foods, that you have to...